Neil Mattingly (34 results)

paperback. Condition: Good. Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read but remains in clean condition. All of the pages are intact and the cover is intact and the spine may show signs of wear. The book may have minor markings which are not specifically mentioned.…

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Condition: New.

Condition: New.

Hardcover. Condition: As New. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. Dated February 26, 1988, inscribed and signed to the title page "L. Neil Smith." States "First Printing; December 1986." Number line complete 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 -- the first printing. If the Plague of the 14th century had been worse -- if it had depopulated Europe sufficient to delay the European "discovery" of the Americas -- who would have ruled the world? The Caliph of Rome . . . or some weird, powerful, and bloodthirsty amalgam of the Chinese and the Aztecs, on the Western shore of the Americas -- The Crystal Empire? Alternative history, science fiction. 449 pp. Reduced from $47. Jacket art by David B. Mattingly (illustrator). Inscribed by Author(s).…

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. 28pp. Clean copy inside & out. No inscriptions. Size: 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall. Book.

paperback. Condition: Very Good. . Posted within 1 working day. Royal Mail Tracked 24 to UK. Tracked Airmail worldwide. Robust recyclable packaging. Picture is the actual item.

Condition: New.

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. 28pp. Very clean copy inside & out. No inscriptions. Size: 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall. Book.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First Edition. The Crystal Empire by L. Neil Smith (First Edition) A sharp tight copy. Light wear to spine ends. Very minor stain to front board. Bright pictorial dust jacket. Not price-clipped. David B. Mattingly(Cover Artist) (illustrator). Stated First Edition with number line 1-0. BOOK. …

Condition: New.

Hardcover. Condition: As New. Dust Jacket Condition: As New. 1st Edition. First edition/printing. Book and dust jacket both in As New, unread condition. Nice wraparound dj art by Mattingly. An alternate history SF novel of Europe devastated by something greater than The Plague. David B. Mattingly (illustrator).…

Softcover/Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Number Of Pages: 28 | Release Date: 01-12-1990 | EAN: 9780853724759 | Languages: English | Binding: Paperback | Item Condition: UsedVeryGood.

Paper. Condition: Very Good. 28 pages. Very good copy. Colour and black & white photographs and illustrations. Book.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. We like to believe the future is open, full of choices and contingencies. A bridge collapses, a market crashes, a revolution unfolds - and we hunt for the single mistake, the villain, the lucky break that "could have gone differently."This book reveals the deeper truth: most outcomes are not accidents or failures of will. They are the inevitable architecture produced when multiple constraints - physical, energetic, informational, temporal, cognitive, and historical - finally align. Like a ball rolling into a bowl, or a protein folding into its lowest-energy state, systems under sufficient constraints don't probably reach certain endpoints. They must.Drawing on physics (energy landscapes, symmetry breaking, entropy), biology (evolutionary convergence, developmental canalization, metabolic limits), economics (incentive gradients, capital flows, scale effects), computation (hardness, bottlenecks, feedback), psychology (cognitive and narrative constraints), and history (path dependence, geopolitical geography, collapse dynamics), this book shows how the same structural logic operates at every scale.It is not fatalism. It is precision: distinguishing genuine local optionality from the durable constraint landscapes that channel behavior. Understanding these landscapes doesn't trap us - it gives us better maps. You can navigate around visible walls. You cannot navigate around walls you refuse to see.For anyone tired of being perpetually surprised by "unexpected" crises, market concentrations, institutional rot, technological lock-ins, or historical rhymes, this book offers a unifying lens: stop asking "why did this happen?" Start asking "what made anything else impossible?"Clear-eyed, rigorously cross-disciplinary, and ultimately empowering, The Architecture of Inevitable Events equips readers to design smarter constraints, intervene where degrees of freedom still exist, and build systems that steer toward useful attractors rather than brittle disasters. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Delivered from our UK warehouse in 4 to 14 business days. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Empires do not fall because of a single villain. Markets do not crash because of one bad decision. Bodies do not fail because of one broken part. Systems fail-and reorganize-according to patterns that repeat across centuries, scales, and domains.In Pattern and Pressure, Neil Mattingly examines forty pivotal cases through the lens of complex adaptive systems. From the Roman Empire's protocol-driven expansion and third-century crisis to the interconnected trade networks that made the Bronze Age collapse possible; from the Black Death's transmission along Mongol-era routes to the positive-feedback dynamics of inflation, financial contagion, and wealth inequality; from cancer as evolution inside the body to the microbiome as an ecological network; from the internet as a nervous system to data centers as civilization's energy-dependent memory and semiconductors as a concentrated supply-chain chokepoint-these essays reveal the same underlying architecture: feedback loops, scale mismatches, efficiency-resilience trade-offs, coevolution, and the quiet redistribution of function after shock.Written with the precision of a systems analyst and the narrative force of a historian, the collection refuses both monocausal explanations and vague metaphors. It treats Polybius's mixed constitution as an early damping mechanism, the Late Bronze Age palace economies as information-processing systems with no backup, the smartphone as a cognitive prosthesis, open-source software as emergent coordination, and computation itself as applied thermodynamics. The result is a unified account of how order emerges, hardens, becomes brittle, and sometimes survives in unexpected places.For readers of complex systems science, economic history, network theory, and anyone who suspects that the deepest patterns of the past still govern the present, Pattern and Pressure offers a rigorous, wide-ranging map of the forces that shape-and fracture-civilization. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. What kind of system would behave like The Fool? Or The Magician? Or The Moon?The Cybernetic Tarot answers that question with rigorous clarity. Neil Mattingly reinterprets the entire Major Arcana through the lenses of cybernetics, information theory, complex adaptive systems, and second-order observation. Each card becomes a precise structural diagram of forces, feedback, boundaries, entropy, agency, and emergence.Drawing on Norbert Wiener, W. Ross Ashby, Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Donella Meadows, and contemporary complexity science, the book treats the tarot not as fortune-telling or Jungian archetype catalog, but as a combinatorial symbolic language for modeling dynamic situations. The Fool is maximum-entropy exploration at a critical threshold. The Magician is an autopoietic transduction engine. The High Priestess is a latent-memory buffer and second-order observer. The Empress is generative positive-feedback metabolism. The Moon is signal inversion and predictive decoupling under noise. The Sun is hyper-transparent high-throughput resonance. Judgement is a global phase transition driven by a high-amplitude control signal. The World is metastable autopoietic homeostasis.Across twenty-two essays, Mattingly maps iconography onto system diagrams, analyzes feedback architectures, identifies failure modes, examines scale invariance from neural networks to organizations to ecosystems, and reframes classic cybernetic paradoxes of control. The result is both a radical new reading of the Major Arcana and a practical toolkit for thinking about agency, adaptation, and resilience in any complex system.For systems thinkers, complexity scientists, organizational designers, AI researchers, and anyone who has ever sensed that the tarot's enduring power lies in its capacity to model the non-linear dynamics of real situations, The Cybernetic Tarot offers a rigorous, illuminating, and unexpectedly practical framework. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Belief is not a dogma to defend-it is a technology to be deployed.In The Chaos Life: Chaos Magick as a Philosophy of Belief, Action, and Transformation, Neil Mattingly strips away decades of archaic occultism, literalist metaphysics, and ritualistic bloat to reveal the functional core of Chaos Magick: a practical, highly adaptable cognitive technology for self-directed change.Drawing seamlessly across modern cognitive science, cybernetics, pragmatism, and information theory, Mattingly reframes magic not as supernatural intervention, but as an empirical discipline executed upon the human nervous system. From the tactical compression of desire via Austin Osman Spare's sigil mechanics to Robert Anton Wilson's model agnosticism and the deliberate modulation of belief systems, this book presents the self as an open laboratory.Designed non-linearly to be navigated like a landscape rather than read cover-to-cover, The Chaos Life offers a suite of conceptual tools to hijack expectation, bypass internal doubt, alter perspective, and navigate complex systems. Whether approached as an epistemological inquiry, a psychological framework, or a field guide to personal transformation, Mattingly demonstrates that when belief is treated as an instrument rather than an identity, the individual ceases to be a passive recipient of consensus reality-and becomes the experimenter. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. We like to believe the future is open, full of choices and contingencies. A bridge collapses, a market crashes, a revolution unfolds - and we hunt for the single mistake, the villain, the lucky break that "could have gone differently."This book reveals the deeper truth: most outcomes are not accidents or failures of will. They are the inevitable architecture produced when multiple constraints - physical, energetic, informational, temporal, cognitive, and historical - finally align. Like a ball rolling into a bowl, or a protein folding into its lowest-energy state, systems under sufficient constraints don't probably reach certain endpoints. They must.Drawing on physics (energy landscapes, symmetry breaking, entropy), biology (evolutionary convergence, developmental canalization, metabolic limits), economics (incentive gradients, capital flows, scale effects), computation (hardness, bottlenecks, feedback), psychology (cognitive and narrative constraints), and history (path dependence, geopolitical geography, collapse dynamics), this book shows how the same structural logic operates at every scale.It is not fatalism. It is precision: distinguishing genuine local optionality from the durable constraint landscapes that channel behavior. Understanding these landscapes doesn't trap us - it gives us better maps. You can navigate around visible walls. You cannot navigate around walls you refuse to see.For anyone tired of being perpetually surprised by "unexpected" crises, market concentrations, institutional rot, technological lock-ins, or historical rhymes, this book offers a unifying lens: stop asking "why did this happen?" Start asking "what made anything else impossible?"Clear-eyed, rigorously cross-disciplinary, and ultimately empowering, The Architecture of Inevitable Events equips readers to design smarter constraints, intervene where degrees of freedom still exist, and build systems that steer toward useful attractors rather than brittle disasters. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. We like to believe the future is open, full of choices and contingencies. A bridge collapses, a market crashes, a revolution unfolds - and we hunt for the single mistake, the villain, the lucky break that "could have gone differently."This book reveals the deeper truth: most outcomes are not accidents or failures of will. They are the inevitable architecture produced when multiple constraints - physical, energetic, informational, temporal, cognitive, and historical - finally align. Like a ball rolling into a bowl, or a protein folding into its lowest-energy state, systems under sufficient constraints don't probably reach certain endpoints. They must.Drawing on physics (energy landscapes, symmetry breaking, entropy), biology (evolutionary convergence, developmental canalization, metabolic limits), economics (incentive gradients, capital flows, scale effects), computation (hardness, bottlenecks, feedback), psychology (cognitive and narrative constraints), and history (path dependence, geopolitical geography, collapse dynamics), this book shows how the same structural logic operates at every scale.It is not fatalism. It is precision: distinguishing genuine local optionality from the durable constraint landscapes that channel behavior. Understanding these landscapes doesn't trap us - it gives us better maps. You can navigate around visible walls. You cannot navigate around walls you refuse to see.For anyone tired of being perpetually surprised by "unexpected" crises, market concentrations, institutional rot, technological lock-ins, or historical rhymes, this book offers a unifying lens: stop asking "why did this happen?" Start asking "what made anything else impossible?"Clear-eyed, rigorously cross-disciplinary, and ultimately empowering, The Architecture of Inevitable Events equips readers to design smarter constraints, intervene where degrees of freedom still exist, and build systems that steer toward useful attractors rather than brittle disasters. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Belief is not a dogma to defend-it is a technology to be deployed.In The Chaos Life: Chaos Magick as a Philosophy of Belief, Action, and Transformation, Neil Mattingly strips away decades of archaic occultism, literalist metaphysics, and ritualistic bloat to reveal the functional core of Chaos Magick: a practical, highly adaptable cognitive technology for self-directed change.Drawing seamlessly across modern cognitive science, cybernetics, pragmatism, and information theory, Mattingly reframes magic not as supernatural intervention, but as an empirical discipline executed upon the human nervous system. From the tactical compression of desire via Austin Osman Spare's sigil mechanics to Robert Anton Wilson's model agnosticism and the deliberate modulation of belief systems, this book presents the self as an open laboratory.Designed non-linearly to be navigated like a landscape rather than read cover-to-cover, The Chaos Life offers a suite of conceptual tools to hijack expectation, bypass internal doubt, alter perspective, and navigate complex systems. Whether approached as an epistemological inquiry, a psychological framework, or a field guide to personal transformation, Mattingly demonstrates that when belief is treated as an instrument rather than an identity, the individual ceases to be a passive recipient of consensus reality-and becomes the experimenter. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Empires do not fall because of a single villain. Markets do not crash because of one bad decision. Bodies do not fail because of one broken part. Systems fail-and reorganize-according to patterns that repeat across centuries, scales, and domains.In Pattern and Pressure, Neil Mattingly examines forty pivotal cases through the lens of complex adaptive systems. From the Roman Empire's protocol-driven expansion and third-century crisis to the interconnected trade networks that made the Bronze Age collapse possible; from the Black Death's transmission along Mongol-era routes to the positive-feedback dynamics of inflation, financial contagion, and wealth inequality; from cancer as evolution inside the body to the microbiome as an ecological network; from the internet as a nervous system to data centers as civilization's energy-dependent memory and semiconductors as a concentrated supply-chain chokepoint-these essays reveal the same underlying architecture: feedback loops, scale mismatches, efficiency-resilience trade-offs, coevolution, and the quiet redistribution of function after shock.Written with the precision of a systems analyst and the narrative force of a historian, the collection refuses both monocausal explanations and vague metaphors. It treats Polybius's mixed constitution as an early damping mechanism, the Late Bronze Age palace economies as information-processing systems with no backup, the smartphone as a cognitive prosthesis, open-source software as emergent coordination, and computation itself as applied thermodynamics. The result is a unified account of how order emerges, hardens, becomes brittle, and sometimes survives in unexpected places.For readers of complex systems science, economic history, network theory, and anyone who suspects that the deepest patterns of the past still govern the present, Pattern and Pressure offers a rigorous, wide-ranging map of the forces that shape-and fracture-civilization. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. What kind of system would behave like The Fool? Or The Magician? Or The Moon?The Cybernetic Tarot answers that question with rigorous clarity. Neil Mattingly reinterprets the entire Major Arcana through the lenses of cybernetics, information theory, complex adaptive systems, and second-order observation. Each card becomes a precise structural diagram of forces, feedback, boundaries, entropy, agency, and emergence.Drawing on Norbert Wiener, W. Ross Ashby, Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Donella Meadows, and contemporary complexity science, the book treats the tarot not as fortune-telling or Jungian archetype catalog, but as a combinatorial symbolic language for modeling dynamic situations. The Fool is maximum-entropy exploration at a critical threshold. The Magician is an autopoietic transduction engine. The High Priestess is a latent-memory buffer and second-order observer. The Empress is generative positive-feedback metabolism. The Moon is signal inversion and predictive decoupling under noise. The Sun is hyper-transparent high-throughput resonance. Judgement is a global phase transition driven by a high-amplitude control signal. The World is metastable autopoietic homeostasis.Across twenty-two essays, Mattingly maps iconography onto system diagrams, analyzes feedback architectures, identifies failure modes, examines scale invariance from neural networks to organizations to ecosystems, and reframes classic cybernetic paradoxes of control. The result is both a radical new reading of the Major Arcana and a practical toolkit for thinking about agency, adaptation, and resilience in any complex system.For systems thinkers, complexity scientists, organizational designers, AI researchers, and anyone who has ever sensed that the tarot's enduring power lies in its capacity to model the non-linear dynamics of real situations, The Cybernetic Tarot offers a rigorous, illuminating, and unexpectedly practical framework. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Empires do not fall because of a single villain. Markets do not crash because of one bad decision. Bodies do not fail because of one broken part. Systems fail-and reorganize-according to patterns that repeat across centuries, scales, and domains.In Pattern and Pressure, Neil Mattingly examines forty pivotal cases through the lens of complex adaptive systems. From the Roman Empire's protocol-driven expansion and third-century crisis to the interconnected trade networks that made the Bronze Age collapse possible; from the Black Death's transmission along Mongol-era routes to the positive-feedback dynamics of inflation, financial contagion, and wealth inequality; from cancer as evolution inside the body to the microbiome as an ecological network; from the internet as a nervous system to data centers as civilization's energy-dependent memory and semiconductors as a concentrated supply-chain chokepoint-these essays reveal the same underlying architecture: feedback loops, scale mismatches, efficiency-resilience trade-offs, coevolution, and the quiet redistribution of function after shock.Written with the precision of a systems analyst and the narrative force of a historian, the collection refuses both monocausal explanations and vague metaphors. It treats Polybius's mixed constitution as an early damping mechanism, the Late Bronze Age palace economies as information-processing systems with no backup, the smartphone as a cognitive prosthesis, open-source software as emergent coordination, and computation itself as applied thermodynamics. The result is a unified account of how order emerges, hardens, becomes brittle, and sometimes survives in unexpected places.For readers of complex systems science, economic history, network theory, and anyone who suspects that the deepest patterns of the past still govern the present, Pattern and Pressure offers a rigorous, wide-ranging map of the forces that shape-and fracture-civilization. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Constraints | The Architecture of Inevitable Events | Neil Mattingly | Taschenbuch | Englisch | 2026 | NBM House | EAN 9798215940990 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.…

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Predestination | A Philosophical History | Neil Mattingly | Taschenbuch | Englisch | 2026 | NBM House | EAN 9798233331145 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. What kind of system would behave like The Fool? Or The Magician? Or The Moon?The Cybernetic Tarot answers that question with rigorous clarity. Neil Mattingly reinterprets the entire Major Arcana through the lenses of cybernetics, information theory, complex adaptive systems, and second-order observation. Each card becomes a precise structural diagram of forces, feedback, boundaries, entropy, agency, and emergence.Drawing on Norbert Wiener, W. Ross Ashby, Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Donella Meadows, and contemporary complexity science, the book treats the tarot not as fortune-telling or Jungian archetype catalog, but as a combinatorial symbolic language for modeling dynamic situations. The Fool is maximum-entropy exploration at a critical threshold. The Magician is an autopoietic transduction engine. The High Priestess is a latent-memory buffer and second-order observer. The Empress is generative positive-feedback metabolism. The Moon is signal inversion and predictive decoupling under noise. The Sun is hyper-transparent high-throughput resonance. Judgement is a global phase transition driven by a high-amplitude control signal. The World is metastable autopoietic homeostasis.Across twenty-two essays, Mattingly maps iconography onto system diagrams, analyzes feedback architectures, identifies failure modes, examines scale invariance from neural networks to organizations to ecosystems, and reframes classic cybernetic paradoxes of control. The result is both a radical new reading of the Major Arcana and a practical toolkit for thinking about agency, adaptation, and resilience in any complex system.For systems thinkers, complexity scientists, organizational designers, AI researchers, and anyone who has ever sensed that the tarot's enduring power lies in its capacity to model the non-linear dynamics of real situations, The Cybernetic Tarot offers a rigorous, illuminating, and unexpectedly practical framework. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. The Magick of Big Data | Neil Mattingly | Taschenbuch | Englisch | 2026 | NBM House | EAN 9798237648003 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.